Hi it's me.

Hello to every one who doesn’t know me, my name is Lucy, I am 31 years old and local to the South Coast of New South Wales.

For the past few months my mind has been aimlessly (might not be aimless to my mind) wandering into many stories of my past. This experience in absence of anxiety is quite resounding. I find my mind travelling from juvenility to adolescence to early adult hood and back then forth. Memories triggered from places, sounds, smells and people. Almost like god reminding me of who I am, before these pieces became fragmented.

I want to share, these parts of myself, instead of retelling stories inside my mind, I thought, I’d write them down. Writing has always been a huge part of who I am. I first started writing a diary, then stories, stories upon stories of fiction. My life has been more interesting than fiction and it is real. I studied screen and media when I left school and we had a creative writing component in our course. This was probably the easiest subject for me; although admittedly, most were easy to me at the time. I would retell short stories from experiences with my friends in the summer after my HSC. I remember one of my Tafe friends asking, “how I think of these stories?”

“They’re real” I replied with a smile.  

You know I don’t think I would even be able to remember any of those stories now. My life since then has been riddled with trauma and it’s put some massive gaps in my memory along with a head injury in 2009 that really didn’t do wonders to my short-term memory.

Life hasn’t been easy for me. I spent a lot of years in different layers of depression, anxious and in very abusive relationships. My life is literally a novel and I’m actually so glad those long sad years are behind me now. At the time I didn’t see them ever ending and the road through recovery is long and relentless. It’s isolating but it transforms you. A metamorphosis if you will. Caterpiller, cocoon, butterfly – you get it. Something beautiful at the end of the struggle.

People preach this, but when your in the cocoon or struggling to get out, you don’t feel like a darn butterfly.

Most of us don’t get born into ideal circumstance and definitely don’t get born with the mindset to know how to change. I’ve walked next to so many different humans who live with their pain everyday and wear it like a shield, never really getting to know their true self, or forgiveness, they bear the load of life’s pain everyday, but they get up and they keep living. Addiction is prevalent in this realm and it’s just accepted. I think we can carry our wounds or we can use the same amount of energy to heal from them, you always have choices; Instead of repeating patterns of abuse and trauma. The cycle is bad. This world can be hell when you’re stuck in this chain. If you don’t know how to climb out of that hole or you don’t ever give yourself the opportunity to grow or let go. You will stay stuck, struggling like a butterfly breaking from a cocoon. No one is going to hand you anything on a silver platter. Despite the pain you feel or have felt, only you can bear the burden of healing you and through that healing you get given the gift of life. So live.

This all sounds quite deep and depressing but this is my view of life. This is where I have been and this is who I am.

Lucy Jean Grace.